Focused CoPe: Enhancing Resilience and Equity in Urban Coastal Communities through the Co-Generation of Community Capitals

2209139 (Goodall). The overarching goal of this project is to create transferable methods for enhancing resilience and equity in urban coastal communities. While the goal is to produce transferable methods, the project focuses on communities in Hampton Roads region of Virginia — one of the most vulnerable populations to sea level rise in the United States — as community partners.

The hub structure of the project emphasizes the co-generation of community capitals among a diverse team of researchers in partnership with community stakeholders. Community capitals is a term inclusive of both natural-built capitals, such as sea walls, living shorelines, and green stormwater infrastructure, and human-social capitals, such as health, well-being, agency, and empowerment.

The overarching hypothesis is that both forms of community capitals must be advanced in synergy in order to have resilient and equitable urban coastal communities. The research plan operates on two spatial scales, regional and local, because both scales are critical for building community capitals. On the regional scale, the research tasks are to create a geospatial data inventory, a system-wide flood model, and equitable policies for regional climate resilience in urban communities.

On the local scale, the research tasks are to empower and engage communities that have been historically marginalized in the climate resilience conversation, build community capital through workshops that result in co-designed stormwater infrastructure, and measure the co-benefits of green stormwater infrastructure for mental health and well-being. Work across the two scales is connected through shared resources and feedback between the local community and broader-scale regional efforts.

A key intellectual feature of this research is the synergistic advancement of community capitals for climate resilience. Many projects focus on one of these community capitals, but few seek to advance both in synergy with one another. To advance the human-social capital like well-being, empowerment, and agency critical to fostering equitable and resilient communities, this project advances equitable public policies that can have a lasting impact on how coastal urban cities approach the challenge of addressing climate resilience.

For example, the concept of co-designed green stormwater interventions that can be implemented by community members can contribute to both enhancing natural-built capital and social-human capital. To encourage inclusion, the project also has a strong focus on removing barriers to participation facing underrepresented and marginalized communities in the coastal resilience conversations and activities.

To strengthen how natural-built capitals can be assessed and strengthened, the research advances the state of art for modeling complex urban stormwater systems at a regional scale. The strategy is to build from widely used models for engineering design, so that products of the research can be more easily adopted by coastal communities, and to integrate them into a more holistic modeling system.

Lastly, the hub structure of this project provides the opportunity to foster convergence across the project team’s expertise that ranges from hydrologic engineering and ocean science, to architecture and landscape design, to environmental justice and environmental psychology, to social work and community engagement. The project has three primary broader impact goals.

The first is to broaden participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). To achieve this goal, the project team will provide opportunities for eight undergraduate students and one graduate student at Norfolk State University (NSU) — a historically Black university located in Norfolk, Virginia — a partner community for the project.

The project aims to create a long-term partnership between NSU and the University of Virginia to capitalize on their shared interest in climate resilience, and to create authentic and meaningful connections with the local community. The second broader impact goal is outreach and education. The project team will strengthen existing efforts in STEM education to reach public K-12 students: a Learning Barge co-developed between UVA and the Elizabeth River Project (ERP) and the Schoolyard-Long Term Ecological Research (SLTER), a project that leverages NSF support to teach students living on Virginia’s coast about climate resilience.

The third broader impact goal of the project is to have a positive effect on the well-being of the local partner communities. One way this will be assessed is through studying mental health and well-being co-benefits of green infrastructure interventions co-designed and implemented through the project

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.